Half the world’s tech billionaires live in Silicon Valley; a sizable portion of the remainder live just north in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Photograph: SpVVK/Getty Images

Were it real, the Sultanate of Silicon Valley would be among the world’s richest countries.

Cranking out $128,308 per capita in annual gross domestic product (GDP), residents in California’s tech belt out-produce almost every nation on the planet. The valley’s output, pegged at $275bn by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, is higher than Finland’s.

Depending on how one counts it, Qatar’s per-capita GDP, estimated by the World Bank at $128,647 in 2017, is the world’s highest. The per-person output from Silicon Valley – more precisely, the San Jose metro area – actually outpaces Qatar’s by some measures, and puts the valley squarely in the company of such wealthy territories China’s casino peninsula Macau, estimated per-capita GDP $115,367, and Europe’s sumptuously medieval Luxembourg, estimated per-capita GDP $107,641.

Home to nearly 2 million, the San Jose metro area includes Stanford University in Palo Alto, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View and Apple HQ in Cupertino. Half the world’s tech billionaires live in Silicon Valley; a sizable portion of the remainder live just north in the San Francisco Bay Area.

San Francisco, Oakland and their suburbs comprise America’s third most productive metro area by GDP, generating $89,978 per capita, a number that puts it in the company of Singapore and Brunei.

“As a measure of output – how much stuff is being produced – GDP tells us nothing about the distribution of income from that output, which is a much more important determinant of overall wellbeing in a community,” Lew Daly, a senior policy analyst with the thinktank Demos and the co-author of Beyond GDP: New Measures for a New Economy, told the Guardian.

“GDP tells you nothing about how a community is growing,” Daly added. “If the economy is growing, that might even be a negative thing if it is growing inequitably and unsustainably. GDP doesn’t even begin to answer that question.”